This XG started on 17 September 2010 and closed on 27 October 2011. See the Final Report.

The mission of the Unified Service
Description Language Incubator Group is to define a language for describing
general and generic parts of technical and business services to allow services
to become tradable and consumable. See the charter for more information.

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behalf of their organizations by completing this online form.
Non-Members may join W3C or ask the Chair of an
Incubator Group to participate as an Invited
Expert, subject to W3C's policy for approval
of Invited Experts. In order to become an Invited Expert to the USDL XG,
just fill out the following two simple forms. The first gets you a W3C log-in,
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About the Unified Service Description Language XG

The USDL XG was initiated by Attensity, DFKI, SAP, and Siemens in September
2010. It will take the current and available specification of USDL and form it
to the needs of the standardization body. In order to get a most valuable and
comprehensive result, the work in the XG is basically split in three work
streams:

Investigate related standards and approaches, position and integrate the
USDL activity

Re-design USDL to include feedback, requirements and related work

Define and implement reference test cases to validate USDL

The final outcome will be a report with a reworked USDL specification and an
assessment of how to proceed with USDL in September 2011. More information
about the XG can be found in our Wiki. USDL is one part
of the Internet of Services
initiative. This page contains more information about USDL and our vision of
the Internet of Services. You can also contact the chair (Kay Kadner) if you have any questions or
concerns.

The Unified Service Description Language (USDL) is proposed as a “master
data model for services” to describe various types of services ranging from
professional to electronic services. It aims at a holistic service description
putting a special focus on business aspects such as ownership and provisioning,
release stages in a service network, composition and bundling, pricing and
legal aspects among others, in addition to technical aspects.

First iterations of USDL were solely built by SAP Research expending several
person years of effort. About a dozen researchers at SAP Research contributed
to the model by bringing in their expertise from different backgrounds
(computer scientists, incl. security and SLA experts, business economists,
legal scientists, etc.). This was carried out in the context of several
publicly funded research projects under the Internet of Services theme. The
current specifications of this work stream can be found at
www.internet-of-services.com and is known as USDL3.

Subsequent iterations of USDL include the contributions and evaluation
feedbacks of partners external to SAP Research. As an example, the German
Fraunhofer FOKUS institute is prompted to include aspects such as identity
management and Siemens evaluates USDL in controlled experiments in their
setting. Finally, the scope of input is broadened even wider by approaching a
standardization body starting with this Incubator group.